While scientists were investigating for years the genetic load of the human race and who was the first human being to inhabit the earth, as well as the extinct dinosaurs, the idea of studying the origin of the animal world in greater depth had been left out, at least until now, because a team of British scientists after wondering how the first animal that inhabited the earth would look, reconstructed its genetic map.

Jordi Paps and Peter W.H. Holland, scientists from the University of Essex and Oxford were responsible for the implementation of the project, which was published in Nature Communications. The evolution of the animals is really wide and although in the past they were nothing more than simple microorganisms, with time they were expanded to create the animal diversity that we know today.

In order to reach this conclusion, the scientists elaborated a tree of animal life, adding all the species known so far, including humans, in this way, could compare and study the genome of each one. Then, they made a map in which they coded the presence of proteins in each organism, because without these components animal life could not even follow an evolutionary line.

After studying each organism, they found that each of these shared 6,331 genes, this means that their ancestor had the same single-celled organism, however, there are at least 1,189 genes that were not foundup to a certain part of the evolutionary line. According to experts, the genes appeared or mutated so that the animals could continue to evolve and not become extinct in the past. They also explained that these genes could mutate for two reasons:

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The gene was mistakenly copied twice, or mutated to create a new protein.